think of it like a lottery pool. if 20 million people buy tickets and 5 million of them place their tickets in a pool you win regularly, but you only win $4. mining pools take it a step further and pay based on amount of work contributed.
Can you currently setup the software just to validate transactions and profit from it that way?
Mining IS validating transactions. So your answer is, yes you can, and that’s what this thread is about.
If I’m understanding your post #20 correctly it’ll be possible to collect transaction fees even when mining is no longer possible. So it follows that you can validate transactions without actually mining. Am I misunderstanding something?
Yes you are!
Mining will ALWAYS be possible, mining IS the process of validating transactions, and for every given block the writer of that block collects ‘mining reward’ and ‘transaction fees’ (or the pool operator does, then distributes them to the people in the pool).
Mining reward: was 50 BTC per block until December 2012. Is currently 25 BTC block and will remain so till ~December 2016/Jan 2017. Will keep halving every four years until rounding to 8 decimal places makes it ‘a-bit-less-than-halving’. Then ‘a-bit-less-than-halving’ carries on again every four years until the mining reward drops to 0.00000001 BTC. Once that four year period is up (the year 2140 or so?), mining reward drops to zero. Mining REMAINS POSSIBLE, and indeed hopefully remains quite profitable, because of:
Transaction fees: as explained above. Have been zero for many (most?) blocks up until now. Have recently averaged some rather small amount per block (WAG - 0.001 BTC). Will gradually increase over time in a market-driven situation (don’t pay a fee, don’t expect to get your transaction validated. Or possibly yes, but in a week’s time or something). Will make it worthwhile for miners to continue mining (which, to belabor a point, is the process of validating transactions 
). If it doesn’t, few miners will mine. Transactions will take much longer. Freeloaders will understand they need they need to pay a little something to the system. Ex-miners will note this and resume mining.
Or, of course, the whole system will just fade out. But if Bitcoin dies it will be due to either some hitherto unnoticed crucial flaw in the algorithms, or the lack of any need for a crypto-currency, or the rise of a ‘better’ cryptocurrency and its displacement of Bitcoin. But these scenarios, if they happen at all, will happen long before 2140.
Perhaps what’s throwing you off is the word ‘mining’. It’s metaphorical. The people who are mining are (have I mentioned this yet?) VALIDATING TRANSACTIONS on the network. They are N O T ‘discovering bitcoins’. They are being awarded bitcoins, which are being generated by a process that cannot be decoupled from the process of validating transactions.
Nancarrow: I very much appreciate all of the information that you’ve provided.
It will be a while before I get serious about this, but I will get in touch when that time comes if I may.
I have a Technet subscription so can run pretty much any MS product I want free of charge, that means all of my 8 systems are on Windows. I have 4 2P servers and 4 normal PC’s. These range from a dual processor 32 hyperthreaded behemoth w/ 2 7950’s to my little A8 Llano HTPC.
Thanks for the info, Nancarrow. So if I have a bitcoin, what do I really have? Is it a series of numbers on the HD of my computer?
in a nutshell, yes.
This new thread seems relevant.
“Bitcoins Drop 50% Today”
Thanks Davidm. That’s some bizarre stuff even by Wall Street “flash crash” standards.
I’ll definitely have to look into what the cost of electricity will be per bitcoin - assuming long term probabilities. But keep in mind that I’ve been running these machines 24/7 at 100% load, in many cases overclocked, for free for the projects I participate in. Of course those projects actually do something useful like medical research for example.